Tech Surgery Gone Wild (Part 3)
Read Part 1, and Part 2
When we last left my friend’s iMac DV troubles, we had confirmed the iMac was a glorified paperweight, and we were hoping the working model would arrive. Well, there were payment issues involving that other iMac, but yesterday the seller of the broken iMac provided another one. Sadly, it’s an earlier version, 400Mhz, and 64MB of RAM, but - he promised - it worked.
Once we got it out of the box and plugged it in, to our shock, the seller was right. We got the startup chime, the screen went on, and the flashing “?” folder appeared[1]. We had, to our shock, a computer at last.
Installing OS 9 was painless, but installing OS X would prove to be more difficult. First, the OS 9 and Temple’s dorm network do not, apparently, get along. There seemed to be no way in hell to get the Mac to realize it was connected to the network. Hopefully, it’s a problem with the OS, and not the Ethernet port, or we’re going to really have trouble. This, of course, meant I could not download the firmware update.
Running the OS X 10.4 installer, as well, delivered the message that it could not be installed on that particular Mac. So, I’m getting my hands on 10.3 and hoping that will work[2]
